Ordinarily, these two events would not be related except I was also tracking down a local disk utilization issue that was vexing me as on a day-to-day basis as my local SSD storage would ephemerally increase/decrease by GIGABYTES and I couldn’t figure out why.

So this evening, quite literally as I was reading RSnake’s interesting blog post titled “So your nude selfies were just hacked,” a Growl notification popped up informing me that several new Dropbox files were completing synchronization.

Puzzled because I wasn’t aware of any public shares and/or remote folders I was synching, I checked the Dropbox synch status and saw a number of files that were unfamiliar — and yet the names of the files certainly piqued my interest…they appeared to belong to a very good friend of mine given their titles. o_O

I checked the folder these files were resting in — gigabytes of them — and realized it was a shared folder that I had setup 3 years ago to allow a friend of mine to share a video from one of our infamous Jiu Jitsu smackdown sessions from the RSA Security Conference. I hadn’t bothered to unshare said folder for years, especially since my cloud storage quota kept increasing while my local storage didn’t.

As I put 1 and 1 together, I realized that for at least a couple of years, Jeremiah (Grossman) had been using this dropbox share folder titled “Dropit” as a repository for file storage, thinking it was HIS!

This is why gigs of storage was appearing/disappearing from my local storage when he added/removed files, but I didn’t see the synch messages and thus didn’t see the filenames.

I jumped on Twitter and engaged Jer in a DM session (see below) where I was laughing so hard I was crying…he eventually called me and I walked him through what happened.

Once we came to terms of what had happened, how much fun I could have with this, Jer ultimately copied the files off the share and I unshared the Dropbox folder.

We agreed it was important to share this event because like previous issues each of us have had, we’re all about honest disclosure so we (and others) can learn from our mistakes.

The lessons learned?

Dropbox doesn’t make it clear whether a folder that’s shared and mounted is yours or someone else’s — they look the same.

Ensure you know where your data is synching to! Services like Dropbox, iCloud, Google Drive, SkyDrive, etc. make it VERY easy to forget where things are actually stored!

Check your logs and/or enable things like Growl notifications (on the Mac) to ensure you can see when things are happening

Unshare things when you’re done. Audit these services regularly.

Even seasoned security pros can make basic security/privacy mistakes; I shared a folder and didn’t audit it and Jer put stuff in a folder he thought was his. It wasn’t.

Never store nudie pics on a folder you don’t encrypt — and as far as I can tell, Jer didn’t…but I DIDN’T CLICK…HONEST!

Jer and I laughed our asses off, but imagine if this had been confidential information or embarrassing pictures and I wasn’t his friend.

Rich Mogull (Securosis) and I have given a standing set of talks over the last 5-6 years at the RSA Security Conference that focus on innovation, disruption and ultimately making security practitioners more relevant in the face of all this churn.

We’ve always offered practical peeks of what’s coming and what folks can do to prepare.

This year, we (I should say mostly Rich) built a bunch of Ruby code that leveraged stuff running in Amazon Web Services (and using other Cloud services) to show how security folks with little “coding” capabilities could build and deploy this themselves.

Specifically, this talk was about SecDevOps — using principles that allow for automated and elastic cloud services to do interesting security things that can be leveraged in public and private clouds using Chef and other assorted mechanisms.

I also built a bunch of stuff using the RackSpace Private Cloud stack and Chef, but didn’t have the wherewithal or time to demonstrate it — and doing live demos over a tethered iPad connection to AWS meant that if it sucked, it was Rich’s fault.

You can find the presentation here (it clearly doesn’t include the live demos):

During the 2014 RSA Conference, I participated on a repeating panel with Bret Hartman, CTO of Cisco’s Security Business Unit and Martin Brown from BT. The first day was moderated by Jon Olstik while the second day, the three of us were left to, um, self-moderate.

It occurred to me that during our very lively (and packed) second day wherein the audience was extremely interactive, I should boost the challenge I made to the audience on day one by offering a little monetary encouragement in answering a question.

Since the panel was titled “Network Security Smackdown: Which Technologies Will Survive?,” I offered a $20 kicker to anyone who could come up with a legitimate counter example — give me one “network security” technology that has actually gone away in the last 20 years.

<chirp chirp>

Despite Bret trying to pocket the money and many folks trying valiantly to answer, I still have my twenty bucks.

I could probably just ask this of some of my friends — many of whom are the best in the business when it comes to Red Teaming/Pen Testing, but I thought it would be an interesting little dialog here, in the open:

When a Red Team is engaged by an entity to perform a legally-authorized pentest (physical or electronic) with an explicit “get out of jail free card,” does that change the tactics, strategy and risk appetite of the team were they not to have that parachute?

Specifically, does the team dial-up or dial-down the aggressiveness of the approach and execution KNOWING that they won’t be prosecuted, go to jail, etc.?

Blackhats and criminals operating outside this envelope don’t have the luxury of counting on a gilded escape should failure occur and thus the risk/reward mapping *might* be quite different.

To that point, I wonder what the gap is between an authorized Red Team action versus those that have everything to lose? What say ye?

The results of a long-running series of extremely scientific studies has produced a Metric Crapload™ of anecdata.

Namely, hundreds of detailed discussions (read: lots of booze and whining) over the last 5 years has resulted in the following:

Most in-line security appliances (excluding firewalls) with the ability to actively dispose of traffic — services such as IPS, WAF, Anti-malware — are deployed in “monitor” or “learning” mode are rarely, if ever, enabled with automated blocking. In essence, they are deployed as detective versus preventative security services.

I have many reasons compiled for this.

I am interested in hearing whether you agree/disagree and your reasons for such.

Intel‘s implementation of the TCG-driven TPM — the Trusted Platform Module — often described as a hardware root of trust, is essentially a cryptographic processor that allows for the storage (and retrieval) and attestation of keys. There are all sorts of uses for this technology, including things I’ve written of and spoken about many times prior. Here’s a couple of good links:

But here’s something that ought to make you chuckle, especially in light of current news and a renewed focus on supply chain management relative to security and trust.

The Intel TPM implementation that is used by many PC manufacturers, the same one that plays a large role in Intel’s TXT and Mt. Wilson Attestation platform, is apparently…wait for it…manufactured in…wait for it…China.

Imagine you are part of a company in the “Pet Industry.” Let’s say dogs, specifically.

Imagine further that regardless of whether you work on the end that feeds the dog, provides services focused on grooming the dog, sells accessories for the dog, actually breeds and raises the dog or deals with cleaning up what comes out the other end of the dog, that you also simultaneously spend your time offering your opinions on how much you despise the dog industry.

Hmmmm.

Now, either you’re being refreshingly honest, or you’re simply being shrewd about which end of the mutt you’re targeting your services toward — and sometimes it’s both ends and the middle — but you’re still a part of the dog industry.

And we all know it’s a dog-eat-dog world…in the Pet business as it is in the Security business. Which ironically illustrates the cannibalistic nature of being in the security industry whilst trying to distance oneself by juxtaposing the position of the security community.

Claiming to be a Dog Whisperer in an industry of other aimless people shouting and clapping loudly whilst looking to perpetuate bad dog-breeding practices so they can sell across the supply chain is an interesting tactic. However, yelling “BAD DOG!” and wondering why it continues to eat your slippers doesn’t change behavior.

You can’t easily dismantle and industry but you can offer better training, solutions or techniques to make a difference.

Lori Macvittie is at the Gartner DC conference today and tweeted something extraordinary from one of the sessions focused on SDN (actually there were numerous juicy tidbits, but this one caught my attention:

Regardless of how one might “feel” about SDN, the notion of agility in service delivery wherein the network can be exposed and consumed as a service versus a trunk port and some VLANs is…the right thing. Just because the network is “flat” doesn’t mean it’s services are or that the delivery of said services are any less complex. I just wrote about this here: The Tyranny Of Taming (Network) Traffic: Steering, Service Insertion and Chaining…

“Flat networks” end up being carved right back up into VLANs and thus L3 routing domains to provide for isolation and security boundaries…and then to deal with that we get new protocols to deal with VLAN exhaustion, mobility and L2 stretch and…

It seems like some of the people at the Gartner DC show (from this and other tweets as I am not there) are abjectly allergic to abstraction beyond that which they can physically exercise dominion.

Many people who may only casually read my blog or peer at the timeline of my tweets may come away with the opinion that I suffer from confirmation bias when I speak about security and Cloud.

That is, many conclude that I am pro Private Cloud and against Public Cloud.

I find this deliciously ironic and wildly inaccurate. However, I must also take responsibility for this, as anytime one threads the needle and attempts to present a view from both sides with regard to incendiary topics without planting a polarizing stake in the ground, it gets confusing.

Let me clear some things up.

Digging deeper into what I believe, one would actually find that my blog, tweets, presentations, talks and keynotes highlight deficiencies in current security practices and solutions on the part of providers, practitioners and users in both Public AND Private Cloud, and in my own estimation, deliver an operationally-centric perspective that is reasonably critical and yet sensitive to emergent paths as well as the well-trodden path behind us.

I’m not a developer. I dabble in little bits of code (interpreted and compiled) for humor and to try and remain relevant. Nor am I an application security expert for the same reason. However, I spend a lot of time around developers of all sorts, those that write code for machines whose end goal isn’t to deliver applications directly, but rather help deliver them securely. Which may seem odd as you read on…

The name of this blog, Rational Survivability, highlights my belief that the last two decades of security architecture and practices — while useful in foundation — requires a rather aggressive tune-up of priorities.

Our trust models, architecture, and operational silos have not kept pace with the velocity of the environments they were initially designed to support and unfortunately as defenders, we’ve been outpaced by both developers and attackers.

Since we’ve come to the conclusion that there’s no such thing as perfect security, “survivability” is a better goal. Survivability leverages “security” and is ultimately a subset of resilience but is defined as the “…capability of a system to fulfill its mission, in a timely manner, in the presence of attacks, failures, or accidents.” You might be interested in this little ditty from back in 2007 on the topic.

Sharp readers will immediately recognize the parallels between this definition of “survivability,” how security applies within context, and how phrases like “design for failure” align. In fact, this is one of the calling cards of a company that has become synonymous with (IaaS) Public Cloud: Amazon Web Services (AWS.) I’ll use them as an example going forward.

So here’s a line in the sand that I think will be polarizing enough:

I really hope that AWS continues to gain traction with the Enterprise. I hope that AWS continues to disrupt the network and security ecosystem. I hope that AWS continues to pressure the status quo and I hope that they do it quickly.

Why?

Almost a decade ago, the Open Group’s Jericho Forum published their Commandments. Designed to promote a change in thinking and operational constructs with respect to security, what they presciently released upon the world describes a point at which one might imagine taking one’s most important assets and connecting them directly to the Internet and the shifts required to understand what that would mean to “security”:

The scope and level of protection should be specific and appropriate to the asset at risk.

Security mechanisms must be pervasive, simple, scalable, and easy to manage.

Assume context at your peril.

Devices and applications must communicate using open, secure protocols.

All devices must be capable of maintaining their security policy on an un-trusted network.

All people, processes, and technology must have declared and transparent levels of trust for any transaction to take place.

Mutual trust assurance levels must be determinable.

Authentication, authorization, and accountability must interoperate/exchange outside of your locus/area of control

Access to data should be controlled by security attributes of the data itself

Data privacy (and security of any asset of sufficiently high value) requires a segregation of duties/privileges

By default, data must be appropriately secured when stored, in transit, and in use.

These seem harmless enough today, but were quite unsettling when paired with the notion of “de-perimieterization” which was often misconstrued to mean the immediate disposal of firewalls. Many security professionals appreciated the commandments for what they expressed, but the the design patterns, availability of solutions and belief systems of traditionalists constrained traction.

Interestingly enough, now that the technology, platforms, and utility services have evolved to enable these sorts of capabilities, and in fact have stressed our approaches to date, these exact tenets are what Public Cloud forces us to come to terms with.

If one were to look at what public cloud services like AWS mean when aligned to traditional “enterprise” security architecture, operations and solutions, and map that against the Jericho Forum’s Commandments, it enables such a perfect rethink.

Instead of being focused on implementing “security” to protect applications and information based at the network layer — which is more often than not blind to both, contextually and semantically — public cloud computing forces us to shift our security models back to protecting the things that matter most: the information and the conduits that traffic in them (applications.)

As networks become more abstracted, it means that existing security models do also. This means that we must think about security programatticaly and embedded as a functional delivery requirement of the application.

“Security” in complex, distributed and networked systems is NOT a tidy simple atomic service. It is, unfortunately, represented as such because we choose to use a single noun to represent an aggregate of many sub-services, shotgunned across many layers, each with its own context, metadata, protocols and consumption models.

As the use cases for public cloud obscure and abstract these layers — flattens them — we’re left with the core of that which we should focus:

Build secure, reliable, resilient, and survivable systems of applications, comprised of secure services, atop platforms that are themselves engineered to do the same in way in which the information which transits them inherits these qualities.

So if Public Cloud forces one to think this way, how does one relate this to practices of today?

Frankly, enterprise (network) security design patterns are a crutch. The screened-subnet DMZ patterns with perimeters is outmoded. As Gunnar Peterson eloquently described, our best attempts at “security” over time are always some variation of firewalls and SSL. This is the sux0r. Importantly, this is not stated to blame anyone or suggest that a bad job is being done, but rather that a better one can be.

It’s not like we don’t know *what* the problems are, we just don’t invest in solving them as long term projects. Instead, we deploy compensation that defers what is now becoming more inevitable: the compromise of applications that are poorly engineered and defended by systems that have no knowledge or context of the things they are defending.

We all know this, but yet looking at most private cloud platforms and implementations, we gravitate toward replicating these traditional design patterns logically after we’ve gone to so much trouble to articulate our way around them. Public clouds make us approach what, where and how we apply “security” differently because we don’t have these crutches.

Either we learn to walk without them or simply not move forward.

Now, let me be clear. I’m not suggesting that we don’t need security controls, but I do mean that we need a different and better application of them at a different level, protecting things that aren’t tied to physical topology or addressing schemes…or operating systems (inclusive of things like hypervisors, also.)

I think we’re getting closer. Beyond infrastructure as a service, platform as a service gets us even closer.

Interestingly, at the same time we see the evolution of computing with Public Cloud, networking is also undergoing a renaissance, and as this occurs, security is coming along for the ride. Because it has to.

As I was writing this blog (ironically in the parking lot of VMware awaiting the start of a meeting to discuss abstraction, networking and security,) James Staten (Forrester) tweeted something from @Werner Vogels keynote at AWS re:invent:

Werner: “There’s no excuse not to use fine grained security to make your apps secure from the start.” Echoing @kindervag Zero Trust

So while I may have been, and will continue to be, a thorn in the side of platform providers to improve the “survivability” capabilities to help us get from there to there, I reiterate the title of this scribbling: Amazon Web Services (AWS) Is the Best Thing To Happen To Security & I Desperately Want It To Succeed.

I trust that’s clear?

/Hoff

P.S. There’s so much more I could/should write, but I’m late for the meeting 🙂